Why you can't believe a word you read about Trump in the mainstream press, Part MMMLX

This is what gets called "journalism."

For as wised-up as I like to think I’ve become, I’m still largely the wide-eyed kid I was when I read “Atlas Shrugged” in eighth grade and thought to myself, “Yes, the Ayn Rand vision is how the world should work.” It took years for me to get it that, even for the very best and most productive people, actual life is how Bill Barr described the job of being Attorney General — “one damn thing after the next.”

Still, my teenage gullibility seems to persist.

A few days ago, I read in the august New York Times that Trump had told a crowd at an Ohio rally for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno (who won the nomination today) that, if he (Trump) lost the upcoming election, there would be a “bloodbath,” and that some illegal immigrants are “not people” but instead are “animals.” The Times’ article is here; the speech itself is here.

I was disgusted. Who wouldn’t be? For as disastrous as Biden would be if re-elected, I thought, I simply cannot vote for this guy. Mocking McCain for being a prisoner of war? Love letters to Kim Jong Un? Praise for KGB holdover Vladimir Putin? Egging on a mob because you’re not adult enough to accept that you lost? And now this?

Good grief. At some point, enough has to be enough.

Then I remembered: This isn’t Walter Cronkite reading the news. This is the New York Times describing its version of Satan. In a situation like that, the Times’ coverage is to journalism what Godzilla is to Fido.

Here’s the actual story and the lessons we should draw from it, courtesy of decidedly anti-Trump writer Sam Kahn:

Well, it’s another Trump election cycle, which means separate sets of alternative realities. There’s Trump reality…[and] then there’s the media depiction of Trump, which has a tendency to veer off into its own projections. 

As tempting as it is for the media and for Trump-haters (myself included) to assume one or another of our nightmare visions of a Trump presidency, it’s a self-defeating impulse. And we have seen this play out before. In 2016, the press forgot about established principles of reporting to portray Trump as having no chance and his campaign as constantly on the verge of collapse. That did lasting damage to the integrity of journalism and, ironically, it weakened the media’s ability to help stem Trump—he was able to run against the media and the “establishment” as much as he was against the Democratic Party. In an election cycle, there is bound to be spin and exaggeration, but it is vital that those who purport to be in positions of detached observation (like journalists and headline editors) keep it together and critique Trump for what he actually says he’ll do or intends to do as opposed to our embellishments of it. 

Of course that discipline isn’t going to happen. If you think things are bad now……… But I digress.

Take Trump’s Ohio speech, the most recent outrage and the branching-off point for the divergent realities. I first read about the speech in The New York Times and learned the following: that Trump had predicted a “blood bath” if he lost; that he said “some migrants” were “not people” and were “animals.” And it was also strongly implied that Trump had lost his grip, that he was “discursive” and that the speech was utterly self-absorbed, with Trump “only sparingly” talking about the purported subject of the speech…Bernie Moreno. 

All that seemed clear-cut enough and fit a certain picture of what The New York Times calls “the doomsday vision” of Trump’s third presidential run. And that coverage was echoed in other bastions of the mainstream media. The Hill’s headline was: “Trump warns US will see ‘bloodbath’ if not reelected.” CBS’ was: “Trump says there will be a bloodbath if he loses November election.” 

Is that what Trump actually said?

He did praise Moreno several times and tied Moreno closely to his own candidacy—which was all that Moreno needed out of him. In saying “I don’t know if you call them people in some cases,” he was talking, at least at that moment, about “MS-13” and gang members, as opposed to all “migrants.” The “animals” line referred to violent criminals.

This brought to mind the story from last September about an MS-13 gang that used machetes to hack to death two teenage girls (and two boys). To say that the killers were animals, as Trump did, is, arguably, to defame animals.

And, in context, it was clear that, in the most controversial line of the speech, he was talking about an economic “bloodbath.” The moment in question came during an extended section on auto workers and the car industry and Trump went into a riff saying, “Now if I don’t get elected it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole country.” Anybody watching the entire speech would have known that the skipped-over word in there was “economy.” 

None of this is to detract from the very real dangers that Trump poses. He was a terrible president.

Not true, but Kahn’s essay was clearly labeled an opinion piece.

He degraded the dignity of the office in unprecedented ways.

That, I fear, is true. But what’s most notable about the Kahn piece is its punchline:

[I]t is incumbent upon the media—the “establishment media” above all—to exercise some real responsibility and not fall once again into the trap that was set for them in 2016. Trump didn’t, in the Ohio speech, actually predict a violent bloodbath, as the editors of The New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, etc. very strongly implied he did in their choice of headline. (You would have to read far down in each of those articles to get the context.) And it is fanciful to believe that he is somehow falling apart on the campaign trail. 

It’s not merely a departure from long-accepted journalistic norms. Let’s call it what it actually is — the functional equivalent of lying.

There’s one other observation Kahn makes, one that I had swirling in the back of my mind but that Kahn captures quite nicely (emphasis added):

He really is very skilled at running for president. He speaks like an actual person, where the leading Democrats have a great deal of trouble tearing themselves away from their teleprompters and talking points. He can be amusing (some of his more famous incendiary comments are clearly jokes if you listen to them in context).

Indeed. Trump does speak like an actual person. What he says is sometimes true, and sometimes not so much, but the contrast to the 50-year pol, Teleprompter Joe, is striking. Trump is sometimes insufferable and often grossly self-absorbed, but he’s insufferable in ways a normal human being can relate to. I suspect this could be quite important on election day.

BONUS COVERAGE:

If you think journalism is slanted off the cliff, try law school.